


honeycomb

by rain (meggowo)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Body Horror, Character Study, Entomophobia, Gen, Nightmares, Season 1, The Corruption, Trypophobia, copious amounts of worms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23850493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meggowo/pseuds/rain
Summary: He got out of bed after only a couple hours of sleep and went to make himself a cup of strong black tea in the office kitchen, crushing a couple of silver worms underfoot along the way.Maybe his newfound insomnia was for the best
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	honeycomb

**Author's Note:**

> the corruption is one of the entities that scares me the most so i have no idea why i chose to write a fic exploring martin's experience and probable fear of it but here we are. i hope i tagged this correctly, this is my first time writing for tma and i'm still trying to work out how to write martin so please do not judge me too harshly!!
> 
> i hope you can enjoy this to some degree, i'm glad i don't have to think about jane prentiss's hole-y skin anymore!!

If anyone were to ask Martin why he took the archival assistant position at the Magnus Institute, he didn’t think he would honestly be able to tell them. At the time it had sounded like a good deal – he’d needed a job badly enough to lie on his resume, and this one had landed right in his lap when he’d started running out of options. The benefits were good, the pay was decent, what else could he have asked for? And sure, he didn’t know the first thing about working in such a setting, but the work was easy enough once he started, mostly just organizing the mess that was the archives and helping the archivist with statements. His colleagues were fine, sure Sasha was known to play the odd practical joke around the office, and Tim didn’t seem to like him very much, but it was all fine! He wasn’t there for the friend-making opportunity anyway, and if all he could do was be a comforting presence with a cup of tea ready for those who needed it, he was fine with that. He kept the small office kitchen stocked with his colleagues’ favourite biscuits and teas and that was enough for him.

And then there was Jon.

He didn’t think much of him at first, that much he could be honest about. He was a slim fellow with strict, dark hair that was beginning to gray and thin, wire-rimmed glasses that sat on a long, slender nose covered by a smattering of freckles. His eyes were dark and stern, and Martin had found himself gripped by that overly critical gaze one too many occasions. The man was severe, but Martin found himself infatuated by his rare moments of softness quite quickly. The man worked himself hard, too hard, and there were times where the weariness would betray a faint slope in his normally rigid posture, or a small smile when Tim managed to say something that he found funny. It was impossible to say why, but Martin was drawn to this tired, stark man, though he wouldn’t be surprised if Jon saw him as a lumbering fool in turn.

But maybe that was why he found it so hard to turn him down when he asked for further investigation on so many of his statements. Even if the inquiries took him into grey-area territory with the law. He wanted those weary, dark eyes to soften when they looked at him, just once, he wanted to be the reason that Jon could stand to relax for at least a moment.

Jon sent him to the Carlos Vittery’s old flat on Boothby Road as February was drawing to a close, to follow up on a statement. It’d been a cloudy day, one like any other, and nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. There was nothing to tell him that this was the last normal day he would have while working at the Institute. In fact, he’d tried to make quick work of the visit, barely paying attention to anything he didn’t need to; nobody had answered the front door, so he’d been quick to look for another way in, something he’d found quickly in the form of an open basement window.

He’d been paying so little attention that it was a wonder that he’d noticed the little, squirming silver worm in the grass at all. Small, with a lean grey body and a black head, the worm had pulsed eerily, and when it started to move towards him, Martin got a distinct feeling that it was charging him.

The worm squished easily beneath his boot.

The basement was dusty and smelled like mould, and in a weird way it felt cut off from the world outside as if he had just stepped into a small pocket dimension where there was no one other than him. But he found nothing. The only reason he’d ended up returning at all later that evening was because he’d wanted something, anything to present to Jon, to ease his mind at least a little. He came to regret the choice very quickly. 

He hadn’t known enough about Jane Prentiss to immediately recognize her in that basement. Her long, knotted black hair and moth-eaten grey overcoat had been the only normal things about her, though they’d been all he could make out at first. Then she’d coughed into a green handkerchief, and a single, silver worm had fallen out of her mouth, rimmed with blackened, splitting teeth, splattering against the floor in a wet, slimy _smack._ She’d removed her overcoat, and the dead looking skin revealed beneath it was a dark, patchy grey that barely hung on to her bony frame.

It was riddled with holes that leaked out small, silvery worms like honey from a honeycomb, pulsing with every laboured breath she took. The worms spilled out in a wave of glinting grey, rolling towards him as she stepped forward, and he barely had the presence of mind to begin stomping on them madly as she approached.

He’d lost his phone in his escape, but he hadn’t realized until after waking up the next... morning? He didn’t know how long he’d slept when he’d gotten home, but it hadn’t seemed to matter. There had been someone knocking on his door, and the winking silver worms that had been present in his apartment only proved to him that it was her. She’d come for him.

He’d only found out later that he’d been trapped in his apartment for thirteen days. Two weeks spent on high alert, barely able to sleep, alone in the dark, desperately trying to block out the constant, aching _knocking._ He’d fallen into a pattern a couple of days in; check possible points of entry, double-check secured places, board up new cracks in the seams of his apartment, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. Throughout it all the knocking was a constant, and whenever it stopped long enough for him to feel some semblance of safety it always came back; heavy and monotonous like the ghostly sound of a war drum echoing across a battlefield. 

Surely it made sense after the fact that he was dreadfully scared of being alone, left to his constant, rising panic as the number of worms around the Institute seemed to double as the days went on. Jon had been nice enough to allow him to stay in a sealed room the archives, but he’d been left to his own devices, left to sleep with a corkscrew clutched in his hands and a swelling terror in his lungs. He was terrified that whatever had happened to Jane would happen to him; whatever parasite had taken over her body was fixated on coming after him now that he’d encountered it.

Most nights he woke up from dreams of those... worms, wriggling in places closer and closer to where he slept, though there was every possibility that that was exactly what was happening. He was so low on sleep that the worms could have been a figment of his own delusions were others not commenting on their presence as well. Plus, the nightmares were much worse – he would see his coworkers overtaken by the whistling silver tides as Jane Prentiss stalked her way towards them. He would look in a mirror, see himself, and be unable to look away; eyes glassy, skin grey and mottled with holes, worms crawling around beneath his skin which pulsed unnaturally with their movement. He would tilt his head and watch one crawl out of his ear, watch its slow path onto his left cheek where it dug in, forming a new hole amongst the old. He would watch his reflection open its mouth and reveal dark, rotten teeth and a throat so clogged with worms that he was left unable to scream. He would wake up every time, skin pinched and aching like it was stretched over chicken wire.

He got out of bed after only a couple hours of sleep and went to make himself a cup of strong black tea in the office kitchen, crushing a couple of silver worms underfoot along the way. Maybe his newfound insomnia was for the best.

**Author's Note:**

> come scream at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/xsunshowerx)!!!
> 
> (also i made a [kofi](https://ko-fi.com/rainsmith), so if you enjoyed this or any of my other work and would like to support me, i would really appreciate it!)


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